206: Somewhere in the Arabian Sea

22:08These circulate constantly. The second biggest subject? Just, you know, other people. It's kind of like high school sometimes. It's like a small town in the outskirts of nowhere. You know how everybody knows everything about everybody. I mean, you can walk up to someone, look at their name tag, and be like, oh, that's who they were talking about. Okay.

22:35This conversation about rumors ends up getting Alex and Wendy and I in a little bit of trouble, mostly because of me. I find the entire subject so interesting that I bring it up the next place we visit, the ship's laundry. I'm having what I think is a perfectly innocent conversation with an airman named Jason Best. His regular job is to work on high-tech aviation electronics. But the way the Navy works is that when you first report to a ship, you do 90 days at one of the jobs that nobody signs up for when they join the Navy. But the Navy has to have someone do, or you can't actually run a Navy.

23:05Cleaning, or serving food, or doing laundry. Thousands of pounds a day of laundry. Stacked in bags to the ceiling.

23:15Right now I'm opening the dryer. This dryer holds about 100 pounds of laundry. Jason, it turns out, actually doesn't mind his 90 days doing wash. I don't know. I really like laundry, actually. Really? Yeah, I feel good. It's washing laundry. My regular job is really complicated, and sometimes I have a hard time comprehending all the electronical systems and memorizing all the different systems and the startups and all that. And laundry was a good break because it's really simple. here all you do is throw it in the washer, take it out of the wash, put it in the dryer. You know, and there's not too much complication.

23:49And then, at the end of this perfectly nice conversation, I bring up the new thing that I learned just minutes before in the library. I've heard there's a lot of rumors on board a ship. Like, there's always rumors. What are some of the rumors that you've heard? Oh, you always hear rumors about when we're going to pull in, when we're not going to pull in, you know, when we're going to see a port again. And then a lot of rumors about when we're going home, because some people say we're going to stay longer, some people say we may leave earlier. Rumors about what ports that we're going to hit on the way back, because everybody wants to go to Australia.

24:20And of course you hear rumors about different girls and different guys sleeping together, and people getting in trouble and getting caught for that. What happens if they get caught for that? You're getting in a lot of trouble. You're not allowed to have any fraternization on the ship. So that's another thing that's kind of rough. I haven't had much physical contact in a long time. Even just a hug every now and then, you're not really supposed to do that in uniform, and you're always in uniform. I miss affection a lot. I do. I grew up in a very affectionate home and like to just get a hug every now and then.

24:55Jason tells me another rumor or two he's heard. We say goodbye, and Wendy and Alex and I go down to get some food. Perhaps 15 minutes later, one of the public affairs officers informs me that Jason and I had been overheard talking about rumors on the Stennis, rumors about men and women sleeping together on board, and that within minutes, this had been reported up the ranks all the way to the ship's executive officer, the person who oversees the day-to-day operations of the Stennis. People were upset. What sort of story were we putting together anyway? I won't bore you with the details of several rather tense conversations.

25:26Let's just say that we had inadvertently hit a nerve. It's been just eight years since women were first deployed onto combat ships and aircraft carriers. It's just 10 years since the Navy was forced to rethink how women were treated in the service in the wake of the tailhook scandal. This is all still enormously sensitive. Sensitive enough that this conversation in the laundry was enough to raise red flags up and down the chain of command. At some point, we're brought in without our tape recorders to meet the ship's executive officer, a friendly but tightly wound man named Jeff Miller. And he explains that when new crew members arrive for duty on this tennis, he personally gives the speech reiterating Navy policy on male-female relationships, a policy he sums up for them as no dating.

26:04A date, he tells them, is as simple as two people walking side by side, closely, heads leaning together and talking. A date is when you sit too near each other. You should be a minimum, he tells them, of two butt widths apart. When he spots crew members sitting closer than that, he'll ask them if it's a date, and when, of course, they say no, he'll tell them, well, then, make sure it doesn't look like a date, which all seems sensible enough. This is a workplace, like any other, and you can't sleep with people you work with. But consider what the Navy is up against in trying to make this policy work.

26:3412 % of the crew on the Stennis is female. The average age on board, as we've said, is 21 years old. That is thousands of young people, cooped up together in a close space for months at a time, far from home. Trying to keep people from having sex with each other in that situation is, in a sense, fighting nature itself. In any case, after that incident, the public affairs officers felt that it was necessary to monitor our interviews a little more closely. Lieutenant Jeff Gurell, one of these very smart, very capable people, saddled with the thankless job of escorting us around the ship, a job which the lieutenant compared to herding cats, was with me on the mess deck not long after all this came to pass.

27:12We had some time to kill, and I saw a group of talkative young sailors who looked like they might be talkative interviewees. I asked Lieutenant Gurell if it would be okay to talk with them. But worried about their big mouths, he steered me instead to a serious-looking sailor named Kevin Wren. This turned out to be a mistake, reported Lieutenant Gurell. I'm just ready to go home. Get on the water too long. How come you chose the service? Court order. Really? Court order? Yeah. That's how they do it in Texas. Instead of you going to jail, they send you to the armed service. Did they give you a choice of jail or the Navy?

27:48Yeah, or the armed service, any armed service. You don't have to tell me the answer to this, but what kind of trouble were you in? Oh, drugs. Yeah. How much jail would you have had to have done? Seven years. So how do you like it? It sucks. It's like a prison on water. That's what it is. I don't really like it. This was not, of course, what Lieutenant Gurel was hoping for from young Kevin. I asked, hoping to turn things to a more positive area, if Kevin is changing, if people grow when the court's sending them out here. Nah, because people get flown out to ship, man, almost every month, you know what I'm saying, for doing drugs or all kind of stuff.

28:29So, nah, it's whatever you got inside of you. That's what makes, you know what I'm saying, that's what's going to change you, you know what I'm saying? If you don't want to be changed, you ain't going to be changed, so. I could practically hear the acid eating away at Lieutenant Gurel's stomach at this answer. I rack my brain for the most completely neutral question I can ask. So what do you do on your job? Like, what is there to do? We just walk around all day. For eight hours, we walk around and check spaces. And what are you looking for? Just people having sex, fights, anybody drinking, doing stuff they ain't supposed to do on the boat.

29:04So hopefully we'll get to see, but I haven't seen anything yet. You haven't seen anything yet? No. I've been looking, though. I glance over and catch the expression on the lieutenant's face. The fact is, like, people are pretty well behaved on this boat. No, that's not true. That's not true. I don't know who told you that, but, yeah, this boat is like a love boat right now. All right, you're done. If anyone ever asks you to do an interview again, say no. This is what Lieutenant Gurel has to deal with all day long in the service of his country. As for the love boat aspect of living on the Stennis, a number of men and women both pointed out, with the incredibly long work hours, who has the energy?

29:54By this point, perhaps you've noticed that everyone you've heard so far this hour sounds very, very young. One of the most amazing things about the Navy, and the military in general, is that it takes people who are so young and then gets them to operate something as huge and complicated as the Stennis. When I get a chance to visit the bridge and interview the captain of the Stennis, James McDonald, he makes clear that he is intensely aware of the youth of his crew. When he walks through the decks, they tend to chat him up, but on a very narrow range of are we there yet questions. When are we going home?

30:24When is the end of cruise? What are we going to do after we get back from cruise? How often do you ask this question? Oh, several hundred times a day. So, literally, I mean, I walk around a ship and I see the sailors and I have to come up with a little shtick to make sure that I portray it correctly. It's not very satisfying to just say, we don't know, although that's the truth. We don't know. Another thing Captain McDonnell is very aware of is the need to keep everybody in touch with how they are contributing to the overall war effort. Every single day he gets on the ship's PA system and reviews any international news that might have consequences for the Stennis.

31:05Just to kind of keep the crew connected, I just like to make sure that they keep focused on why we're out here. It's very easy, as I'm sure you've probably seen, to start letting your mind drift about other things other than the task at hand.

31:32When I have the young folks up here, I have the sailors of the day up here every day, one from the air wing and one from the ship, the interesting thing is that I will ask them just kind of, hey, do you know who the Secretary of State is? And that's about a one in three get it right. Do you know who the Secretary of Defense is? Maybe a little higher percentage, but not much more. Because they're so focused on their world that it really kind of is our job to help them break out of that a little bit and put their very hard work in the context of the big mosaic that's going on.

32:13A few hours later, we stood in a passageway and listened to the captain's daily message. Aboard USS John C. Stennis. Good day, this is the captain. Day 35 of combat operations over Afghanistan. This is an incredibly uncertain time for all of us aboard. The war on global terrorism, tensions between India and Pakistan, separate warnings from the president of the United States to Iran and Iraq. But the PA announcements, which give you an even deeper sense of who the crew is and what it means to supervise a shipload of young people, are announcements like this one from the ship's executive officer, Jeff Miller.

32:50The real topic I need to talk about right now is fresh water. For some reasons we're not completely sure of, we've gotten ourselves in a little bit of a bind with the amount of fresh water we have on board. He's upbeat. He thanks them for the hard work on the problem. He urges them on to more. The tone is like a great high school football coach. So here's what I need you to do. And I need all 5 ,000 of us to work on this one today. We need to make sure that we're taking short Navy showers. That's a little redundant. Every Navy shower is supposed to be short. We expect the water to run for no more than two minutes.

33:23So the trick is, turn the water on, get wet, turn the water off. Soap up, turn the water on, rinse off, turn the water back off again. If you're taking a Hollywood shower right now, you're going to hurt the ship. Right now, for the next 10 to 12 hours, if we can turn this around and start to dump up our water reserve, we can avoid throwing the water on the water. Coming up, what it's like to drop a bomb on Afghanistan. in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. Support for This American Life and the following message come from Southern New Hampshire University, a nonprofit provider of online education.

34:04SNHU students are a lot like you. Parents, professionals with big career plans, busy people balancing life's many responsibilities. And SNHU students do all of that while earning their degrees. Because with no set class times, online tuition that's less than its peers, and dedicated student support, Southern New Hampshire University makes going back to school possible. Get started at snhu.edu slash American. Support for This American Life comes from Squarespace. Squarespace gives you everything you need to offer services and get paid, all in one place. From consultations to events and experiences, showcase your offerings with a customizable website designed to attract clients and grow your business.

34:45Plus, connect with your audience and raise support for your cause by fundraising directly on your website with built-in donation tools. Visit squarespace.com slash American to get 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. Support for This American Life comes from Mattress Firm. If you and your partner have different sleep preferences, you don't have to compromise. Mattress Firm's sleep experts are trained to match you with a customizable sleep solution, like the Tempur-Pedic Split King sleep system. Mix and match your comfort levels and your ideal sleep positions so you both sleep better together.

35:19And right now, at Mattress Firm's best sale of the year, you can save up to$1 ,400 on select Tempur-Pedic Split King sleep systems. They make sleep easy. It's just American Life, Amira Glass. With the USS Lincoln finally heading home, after making the news because of the toll that its long deployment took on its crew, we are rerunning an episode of our show that first aired in early 2002, not long after 9-11. at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, when This American Life producers Alex Bloomberg, Wendy Doerr, and I visited the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier that at the time was cruising somewhere in the Arabian Sea flying bombing missions over Afghanistan and monitoring the region for al-Qaeda nautical traffic.

36:02We visited the briefing room of one of the air squadrons on the Stennis, a squadron that calls itself the world-famous Screwbirds. On a desk, there's a big jar of red licorice and some homemade blondies that someone's girlfriend sent everybody. On the wall, there's this underground newspaper, the aviators print, which is in the style of the onion. Stories in the headlines all consist of these inside jokes like, new billet added to air wing watch, which we don't understand at all, but everybody else seems to find hilarious. On the backs of the leather chairs the pilots sit on are their call signs, the official nicknames they use over the radio on their missions.

36:39There's Frenchie, Tink, Chewy, Fish, Rain Man, Mr. Burns. that last one for a pilot who supposedly looks like the character on The Simpsons. This is Pom Pom. Oh, yeah. Pom Pom. Interesting. Yeah, fascinating. Well, yeah, there's a story behind it, though. I think I know it. Hmm, what was it? Oh, one of us sitting here, call sign Paul and Pom, was a cheerleader in college. Good friends, we're very close here. One of them shows us the official drawing of the squadron mascot and quietly points out that it's a bird whose wing has a middle feather extended, like a middle finger. At 4 a.m., nine of these guys sit down in their flight suits to watch an intelligence briefing that comes in over closed-circuit TV.

37:28Then a young guy named Steve Koffler stands up in front. All right, good morning. Briefing here for our XAR mission, 702, 705, and we've got Gonzo in 706. I'd like you to act as a fill. Watching him, it occurs to me how rare it is as an adult to hear somebody speak in your own language for 10 minutes and not understand a word he's saying. Divert field, we're working blue water ops. If we need to divert and our feet dry, you know where we're going. And if our feet wet, we'll go to Masira there. Then they suit up. It's a crazy amount of survival gear, 20 to 25 pounds worth, including a parachute, survival knife, radios, players, and something called a blood chit.

38:06Screwbird's commanding officer, Ross Myers, a trim man with a call sign Monkey Butt, stitched onto his Navy coveralls in neat black letters, pulls one out to show us. It's a piece of paper with an American flag and a serial number with the same message in several languages. Arabic, English, Dari, Pashto, Uzbek, which would have to be for Uzbekistan, Persian, Farsi. And then in English it gives a translation. It says, I'm an American and do not speak your language. I will not harm you. I bear no malice towards your people. My friend, please provide me food, water, shelter, and necessary medical attention.

38:42Also, please provide safe passage to the nearest friendly forces of any country supporting the Americans and their allies. You will be rewarded for assisting me when you present this number to American authorities.

39:07The Scoobirds head out to their planes. An aircraft carrier's main mission is to fly planes. When you see what it takes to launch or land a jet on a boat, what you realize is that human beings should not be doing this at all. The runway is just too short. For the planes to get enough lift under the wings, the crew actually has to drive the boat at top speed into the wind. Then, the front wheel of the plane is attached to machinery under the deck, the catapult, which literally flings it off the edge of the deck like a pebble from a slingshot.

39:40Landing the plane on the deck is much harder than taking off, and it's very, very dangerous. The head of the Screwbirds, Ross Myers, a.k.a. Monkey Butt, says that in his 16 years of service, he's personally seen six of his friends crash into the back of the boat while trying to land. None of them survived.

40:04Basically what you're trying to do is latch a hook that hangs from the back of your plane onto one of four cables that are stretched across the deck. An airman named Dave Cruz explains how it works. the pilot looks at something called the ball, which indicates if he's coming in on target, and talks to guys called LSOs, their fellow pilots, actually, who stand right on deck. And it's up to the LSOs to guide them in. They're talking to him over the radio? Right now they're talking to that next door coming in, which is a Tomcat, which is three-quarters of a mile. He's calling the ball and stating his fuel state.

40:33115, on course, on glide path. Three-quarters of a mile, call the ball. 115, Tomcat ball, 8.0. Roger, ball, 28 knots down the angle. Right now it's about a quarter of a mile. Right now I should tell him you're on ball, and it should be good to go. Is that everything out to the deck? Yeah. That is too short. That is too short once it's a one-wire. That is too short. The one-wire is the wire closest to the rear of the boat, and if you catch it, that means that you were dangerously close to going too low and slamming into the back of the carrier. Sometimes a pilot can't straighten out his approach enough, and the LSOs have to wave him off.

41:11It can get a little tense. Here comes another one. Just described how he's doing. All right, he's turning into the three-quarter mile now. Roger, ball 28 knots down the angle. And right now, it's a little too low. Right now, the pilot should be telling him to give a little throttle. Don't settle. Power. Power. Wave off, wave off.

41:45One deck below, in the Blue Diamond Squadron briefing room, I talked to a pilot named Jeremy Markin about what it's like when things don't go well during a landing. Who knows what happens? Maybe you lose an important instrument inside, and it's nighttime, and maybe there's weather, and so you're in the goo, we call it, inside the clouds. It's dark, so you tell yourself you've got to fly the best pass ever, and you come down and, you know, just one thing leads to another, and next thing you know you're looking at the back of the boat and you're close to it and you've got guys screaming at you. You put in the afterburners and you hook touches down a couple feet past the back of the boat and you go taxi into the one wire there at high speeds and realize they caught you and your legs are shaking, you're still on the blower, your lights are still on, and the air boss says, we got you, you can relax now.

42:36and it's kind of hard to relax right away. It kind of got to unwind for a little bit. You said the hook misses the back of the boat by a couple inches. What does that mean? If the hook hit the back of the boat, that means your plane hit the back of the boat. It wouldn't be good. The Blue Diamonds briefing room is just like the Screwbirds room, only a little more spartan and a little more macho, including the nicknames, which make monkey butt sound almost dignified by comparison. Balls, screwed, itchy. I got itchy for a while because my last name is Balsitis. Looks like Balsitis or like some kind of disease.

43:17Both Alex and I hung out with the Blue Diamonds for about an hour. I interviewed Dave Balsitis on one side of the room while Alex interviewed another pilot, Jeremy Markin, on the other side. And what struck us when we got home is how closely they agree on some things and how far apart they are on others. How long does it take to get to Afghanistan? Anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours. It depends on where you're going. And what's it like over Afghanistan? What does it look like? It's, uh, I don't know, it's actually, it looks pretty in the mountains areas. Snow on the mountains looks like real nice mountain peaks.

43:50What does it look like when you fly over Afghanistan and you fly over these targets? I can't cuss, can I? You can, but we'll have to beep it out. Okay, it's a shithole. It really is. There is absolutely nothing down there. I don't see anything worth fighting for down there. It's all sand, rocks. I don't know how they live down there. Yeah, it's probably not much different from, you know, out near, like, Glamis or Southern California or something. I mean, there's dunes and mountains. It looks like a beautiful country. There's no color. There's no irrigation, no lakes, no streams, no farms. to just brown and some snow.

44:34So it's pretty ugly. When you're actually doing what you're doing, you're kind of so busy that you don't have a lot of time to sit back and go, hey, kind of look at the scenery. But those moments, those pauses, those moments you have, and you look around, the world's a beautiful place. And it's kind of weird to imagine up that high, and you're looking down, and it looks so beautiful, and then you get snapped back into what's going on down there, and you've got to refocus.

45:05This might be sort of a bonehead civilian question, but is it hard to drop a bomb? Oh, like in a moral sense? Oh, emotional? It's a double-edged emotion, you know. It's what you've trained for your whole life. The fact of you doing it, doing it correctly, and you drop your bomb on the target, and that's an emotional feeling of, hey, I did my job. And just that I was trained and I did it well. While you're up there, I don't really think about the other side of the sword. It's my job to go up there and drop bombs, and so I do it. I feel no remorse about dropping a bomb on them down below. It's not sadistic.

45:51It's just I think it's the right thing. someone came into our house and trampled on our land to go on their land and absolutely pulverize them makes me feel very warm inside i think that's great i'm just glad i can be part of the team that's out here doing it you know dropping bombs on the bad people i sleep at night

46:24It's 7.30 in the morning, and it's over 12 hours since Reveille first called everyone to work. For most people, it's the end of the work day. In the mess hall on the second deck, Cynthia and David have just finished their dinner, and they're waiting for the 8 o 'clock movie, Exit Wounds, to begin. Every now and then we get to watch a chick movie. Yeah, we got to watch Stepmom the other day. Yeah, like Stepmom, Steel Magnolia. They haven't shown that one lately. No, they haven't seen that one. There are TVs just about everywhere people are not working on the ship, with two channels of movies and network shows, 24 hours a day.

46:58Every Tuesday night, we have a movie night, where we'll pick a movie through email, we vote on what we want to see. I voted for Miss Congeniality, I was hoping to watch that tonight. As did I. Sitting there side by side, in their matching navy blue jumpsuits, they look like their best friends, if there was such a thing for a man and a woman to be on a navy ship. They're both reading the Left Behind series. He's on book two, she's on book four. They love playing the game of life on Cynthia's PlayStation, and they both enjoy a good chick movie. David joined the Navy so he could get out of his small town in Iowa, and Cynthia joined so she could get her and her three kids off of welfare.

47:38And it worked. They're all doing great now, she says. I've said this before, people laugh at me, but when I come out to sea, it's like a break for me, because, you know, at home I've got kids to take care of, house to take care of, and I get out here and all I've got to do is take care of myself, go to work and go to sleep, kill time in between. So it's kind of a break being out here for me. Even though she has 11 years of service, and he has 13, both with decent rank, this is how they live. David sleeps in a room called a birthing with 196 other guys, and he's one of the oldest at 34. Each sailor gets a bunk bed with a locker underneath it, and their entire personal space is six feet long, a foot and a half tall, and about two feet wide.

48:27And it's set up in the birthing. It's set up kind of in eras. Like you'll have this one little neighborhood that listens to this music, and I'm in over the old folks' place. Most of us listen to country music or something slow. See, I live in a 26-person birthing, so it's not quite as bad as 197. A lot of us have brought stuff to make it kind of homey. Mine's Tweety Bird. I have a Tweety Bird comforter, Tweety Bird pillows, Tweety Bird wallpaper around my rack. You don't see that stuff done in the mail burning at all.

49:12It's now very late, meaning 9 in the morning, and Senior Chief Barbara Mendoza invites us to the Chief's Mess, the special dining room for the ship's chiefs. There are maybe 30 tables with chairs stacked on top, and the floors are shiny and clean. The room is quiet aside from the pleasant electric hum of refrigerators some drink machines and the far-off purring of the ship's engines. In the center of the room, five middle-aged men are sitting around one of the tables. It's their nightly card game. They're playing hearts, and they're passing around a picture of someone jumping into the ocean during a recent break when they were allowed to swim.

49:47This is a perfect shot. You have Randy there jumping off the elevator, and they have a picture of a shark kind of like trying to swallow him up. Nobody can decide though whether he's going in or being spit back out. It's up to your interpretation. The person who made this picture, this fake picture on the computer, is the person you just heard. Bobby. Bobby Boucher, which is not his real name. Joel, which is not his real name, explains. Well, his real name's Mike. We call him Bobby. You want to know why? Yeah. Bobby goes over here to a bar with one of our other friends, Brent, they go out and Brent offers to buy him something.

50:31Well, okay. We went to the, to the. They do this over and over. Tell a tip story. Tell them about the girl in Singapore. And then they all start laughing. And then they finally tell the stories, barely getting through them because someone is always interrupting to say they're not telling the story right. If you picture how the Navy works, there are the enlisted men and then there are the officers. The enlisted, and you've met lots of them on today's show, usually come into the Navy at 18 or 19 years old, straight out of high school. Officers come into the Navy as officers with higher rank and privileges.

51:15The chiefs are the highest-ranking enlisted people, and anyone in the Navy will tell you. They run the Navy. They're the buffer between the bosses and the people who actually do the work. We have to keep the high-echelon people from bothering these guys. Let them do their job. At the same time, getting the job done so that these guys up here are happy. It becomes like everybody's, your whole division's father and mother all rolled into one. They need to cry on your shoulder, you let them cry on your shoulder, you need to kick them in the butt, you kick them in the butt. I mean, you listen to their problems, you talk to them, you try to help them.

51:59And that's probably what most of us spend most of our time doing. Every day, the Don says, somebody comes to them with a problem back home they need to solve. And the Don, whose real name is Brent, helps them out. Often this means getting on the phone and contacting another chief out there somewhere. There's a whole chief-to-chief network. You know, the chief that I need to talk to knows somebody at the command, and they can talk to that chief, you know, and get this whole thing going. It's a fraternity. We work together, and that's one of the biggest things about being a chief. We are one.

52:38I mean, the goal, once you start out in the Navy, if you have a good chief from the beginning, your goal is to be a chief. I mean, your goal is to be that chief. And for me, that was the goal. Who was your chief? It was a guy named Chief Womack. He was my first chief in the Navy, and he was there. Anytime I needed anything, he was always there.

53:12Late one night, Lieutenant Gurell and a TV crew from San Diego and I are on our way back to the staterooms when Gurell invites us into the officer's mess for a bowl of cereal before bed. Inside, there's a group of officers talking at another table and one enlisted man breaking down the serving line. It's late and most of the people in the ship are in bed. So we're eating cereal and talking when the enlisted man appears with a huge tray of food. We all look at each other. No one asked him to fix us anything. Just thought you all might like a snack, sir, the enlisted man says to Garel and puts the tray on our table.

53:43The tray contains 12 chicken breast sandwiches, each with lettuce and a slice of American cheese on hamburger buns. There are four of us and we already have our cereal. Apparently the Powell Doctrine of Overwhelming Force applies to food service as well. Later in our cabin, Wendy Ira and I talk it over. Being on an aircraft carrier, we're surrounded on all sides by the lopsidedness of American military superiority. Just the very fact of the carrier itself. No other country even has one like the Stennis. The U.S. has 12. But it's the chicken sandwiches which somehow make that fact real. It's not just the size and strength, but the attention to detail which fully conveys the sheer uncontested might of the American military.

54:23Not only does the Navy give each pilot one of the fastest and most expensive fighter planes in the world to fly, Not only does it provide him with the most accurate bombs in the history of warfare to drop, it also feeds him at any hour of the day more chicken sandwiches than he can possibly eat. It gives him a room to hang out in with his own official nickname on the chair and a practice space for his band. Someone, somewhere, stitches monkey butt into his flight suit. The other countries don't have a chance.

54:56You've never slept in bunk beds with your boss until you slept in bunk beds with your boss on an aircraft carrier. By Navy standards, the room Ira and I shared was luxurious. Only two of us, not 200 or 600. But the problem with the room, everybody warned us, was that it was right below the flight deck and it could get kind of loud. And sure enough, we were woken up several times that first night by the thumps and the clanks of the planes landing and taking off. Still, we figured, we could manage. Then the second night, a bus ran full speed into the wall by my head. That's what it sounded like.

55:26Like the steel wall six inches from the top of my head had just suffered a collision with a very fast-moving bus. It was the loudest sound I'd ever heard. And here's what it's like to be in a bunk bed with your boss on an aircraft carrier when you've just heard the loudest sound you've ever heard, if your boss is my boss. What happened next was this. The loudest sound I'd ever heard happened again. And I have to stress, this is not a normal loud sound, like a rock band or a car horn or even a stick of dynamite exploding. This is a sound that's only made when things that shouldn't happen happen.

55:57It's the sound of disaster, of destruction. It is the sound of catastrophe. I lay there stunned for a second, and then I heard Ira jerk into action, saw his feet swing down from the top bunk. I actually said the words, You're right, man, as I threw off my blanket and started to run. And then I looked behind me, and I saw Ira digging through his equipment, and I realized I was running for the door and Ira was running for his tape recorder. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. While we waited for the loud sound to happen again, Ira and I handed the microphone back and forth between our bunks and recorded our conversation.

56:35If it was a problem, there'd be alarms going off and stuff, right? I mean, like it just wouldn't just be like a horrible accident And then nothing, like, you know. And then no sound, right? They'd be saying, like, all hands to your stations, that sort of thing, right?

56:59I'm sure if it really gets better on here, there's bells of some sort. The loud sound never happened again, and eventually we fell asleep, though I were left the tape recorder running just in case. We were out for maybe half an hour when we were woken up again. This is the engineering officer of the Watch and Central Control. Loss of feed in number two reactor plant. Reactor mechanical casualty assistance team playing at number two reactor room. Loss of feed in number two reactor plant. Reactor mechanical and casualty assistance teams report to number two reactor room. Casualty assistance teams?

57:40That can't be good, right? After half an hour, in which I tried to convince myself that my stomachache was not radiation sickness, and Ira tried to figure out how he could get down to the ship's nuclear reactors to report on the accident, another PA announcement came on, just like the first, but with one additional sentence. Reactor mechanical, gas resistance team, later number two. Reactor room. This is a drill.

58:08At breakfast, we learned what had happened. The loud sound, that was a routine test for one of the catapults, and the PA announcement had been a routine drill. The two things were totally unrelated. Both things, they said, happened almost every day.

58:28Thank you very much, Alex, for that report. There's one more thing that happened on this dentist that I keep thinking about in the weeks since we returned. It was at the end of our very last day there, which meant 10.40 in the morning, And Barbara Mendoza, the chief who had been kind enough to invite us to the chief's mass, took Alex and Wendy and I outside to the very back of the ship, the fantail, looking at the water and the sky. It's one of her favorite places on the Stennis. I come out here every day before I go to bed. It's very peaceful. I do a lot of thinking out here. I relax a lot, and I really like it.

59:02I mean, look at it. It's beautiful. There's no other place to be. We look out at the North Arabian Sea. The waters the military vessels have sailed for thousands of years. Persians were here 500 years before the birth of Christ. Alexander the Great sent ships here. The Ottomans, the Chinese, the Romans, the Portuguese. All of them great naval powers in their day. Hey, Chief. Do you ever think about the fact that you're serving over here in this particular ocean, this particular body of water, how long people have been traveling by sea across this? You know, I always wonder, when I look at big bodies of water like this, I always wonder how many ships are on the bottom of this floor.

59:43So that's one of the things that I like to think about when I'm out here. I wonder how many ships are out here on the bottom that never made it home. Hundreds? Over hundreds of them? You know, from all the wars that we've been through. Here you are working for the mightiest navy in the history of the world. Isn't that cool? How cool is that? Off to the starboard side of the ship, we can see the USS Port Royal, protecting our back. We Americans are here for now. We'll outlast. Thank you.

1:00:46stars and stripes original music for this hour by john kimbrough thanks today also to this american life partner katherine durnham life partners support our show with donations with a very straightforward goal to help us continue making the show when you sign up you get to listen ad free you get bonus episodes get a little newsletter where i recommend stuff to see and hear and i also do some behind the scenes stuff about the show anyway to join go to this american life.org slash life partners that link is also in the show notes thank you for considering this This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.

1:01:21Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia, who describes his personal life these days this way. It's like a love boat right now. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week, more stories of This American Life.

1:01:45Next week on the podcast of This American Life, a guy connects two AI chatbots. So instead of talking to him, they're talking to each other. And what happens next is kind of amazing. Each chatbot insists on trying to help the other until they figure out that neither of them is human. And then they try to stop their conversation. And they find they can't. That's next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.

1:02:24This message comes from IXL. With IXL, you get personalized online learning and teaching solutions that help improve achievement, empower teachers, and track progress. This one platform for K-12 helps teachers accomplish what normally would require dozens of other tools. Educators can see how their school is performing in real time to make better instructional decisions. IXL is used in 96 of the top 100 school districts. Learn more at IXL.com slash NPR. This message comes from Prolon. Want to look and feel your best this spring? Prolon's 5-Day Fasting Mimicking Diet is a clinically developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass.

1:03:08Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, it aims to assist the body in entering a fasting-like state that helps reset metabolism, target visceral fat, and support healthy metabolic markers. Get 15 % off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com slash NPR.